by Fiona Barton
“No, I had to ask the way to the maternity hospital.” Jude took a deep breath and, in her head, walked back through the hospital doors.
She took the lift, avoiding eye contact with the other people crammed in with her. They had bunches of flowers, presents in baby and stork wrapping paper, held toddlers by the hand. They were excited, laughing. No one seemed to notice her.
But she realized she’d picked the wrong time. She needed to come at the end of visiting time, not the beginning. There were too many witnesses now. She left the hospital and sat in a nearby park for an hour, growing cold as the weak spring sun began to disappear.
Back in the lift, this time she was alone. The doors opened on the postnatal floor and there were the same people, flowers and congratulations delivered, on their way home now. She’d bought some flowers from a seller on the street outside and clasped them to her stomach.
When the lift doors closed behind her, she was alone for a moment. Then she saw a woman come out of her room halfway down the corridor. She had her wash things and a towel in her hand. She walked away from Jude without seeing her, to the bathroom at the end.
Jude paused, pretending to look in her shopping bag. The woman might have forgotten something. She might come back. But she didn’t. She went into the bathroom and closed the door. Jude couldn’t move for a moment, transfixed by terror at what she was about to do, but then she heard a baby cry in the woman’s room.
I can do this, she said in her head and moved, as if in a dream, through the door. The baby was snuffling in its cot. She walked straight over, picked it up, all wrapped ready, and put it in her shopping bag. And walked away. She took the stairs this time. Nobody used the stairs.
On the train home, a woman said companionably: “When’s yours due?”
“Not long now,” Jude said, and went and stood near the doors, where there was more noise to drown out the baby if it cried. But the baby didn’t make so much as a murmur.
Back in her room, she unwrapped it, like a present, and sat looking at her sleeping child for the first time. It was a girl.
“Hello, Emma,” she said.
EIGHTY-TWO
Angela
WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, 2012
The doctor had given her some pills to dull the shock, but she kept jumping up every time a car passed the house. DI Sinclair had phoned to say he’d be there in twenty minutes. He’d sounded somber and tired and she’d let him go without any further questions.
Nick came downstairs and paced round the room.
“Angie, we’ve got to prepare ourselves for the worst,” he said. “The police have got it wrong. There’s nothing we can do to change it. I think he’s coming to apologize. Don’t you?”
“Let’s see, Nick,” she said. Her head was buzzing again. Filled with Alice.
Nick opened the door before DI Sinclair could knock. “Come in, Andy.”
Angela stood at the window, looking at the detective’s car. There were three people in it.
“Aren’t your colleagues coming in?” she asked.
He hesitated. “No, not at the moment.” The officer cleared his throat.
“Angela, Nick,” he said. “Please sit down. I’ve got some news for you. I’m not sure how to tell you, to be honest.”
He was perspiring, the beads of sweat on his forehead winking in the light.
“That you’ve made a mistake?” Nick said. “We thought that was it.”
“Well, no,” the detective said. “The thing is . . . look, we have found Alice. But she is not the baby on the building site.”
Angela gasped and stood.
“Angie,” Nick said, his voice shaking, pulling her back down beside him. “Tell us, Andy. Just tell us what you’ve found.”
“Alice is alive,” DI Sinclair said.
“Alive?” Angela and Nick both shouted, the sound bouncing off the window.
“Yes.”
“How can she be?” Angela said, frantically looking around the room for her child. “Where is she?”
“She’s here,” DI Sinclair said, his voice catching with the emotion of the moment. He’d never cried on a job, even when he’d been breaking terrible news. But the tension was unbearable.
“Where? Where?” Angela shrieked.
“She’s in the car,” he said.
Angela was out of the front door before they could stop her, running to the car and stopping beside it, her hands spread on the passenger window.
The woman looked back at her, dark hair like Paddy, Louise’s chin. And she put her hands up to mirror her mother’s.
EIGHTY-THREE
Emma
THURSDAY, MAY 3, 2012
Angela and I cannot stop looking at each other. Even when DI Sinclair is talking to us, we look at each other, drinking each other in. She looks like me. I look like her.
I feel like I’m in some sort of surreal dream. I haven’t stopped thinking of Jude as my mother, but I feel like I might love this stranger, too.
DI Sinclair had wanted to wait before reuniting us. He was worried that it would be too much for everyone. “You are in a fragile state, Emma,” he’d said after Jude was taken away to the police station. “There’s a lot to take in. Why don’t we give it a day so you can prepare yourself?”
But I wouldn’t let him leave without me. I was terrified that Angela would reject me, but I had to see her. To be sure.
In the car, I kept thinking that all this time I’ve been looking for a father and I should have been looking for my mother. Paul sat beside me in the back of the car, holding my hand but unable to speak.
And when I saw her burst out of the front door and run towards the car, I knew it was her. I wanted to touch her to see if she was real and I put my hand up to hers at the window.
But I’m not sure what will happen now. The euphoria has faded to a pleasant hum in my head, but there are spikes of fear in my stomach. I’m still afraid. Afraid of how it’ll turn out. Maybe I’ll lose everyone. Jude will go to prison for what she did, and Angela . . . may not want me.
“Alice,” she says as if she can read my thoughts. “I’ve never stopped thinking about you. Never.”
“She hasn’t,” Nick says. My dad. He keeps looking away as if I’m too much to take in. But Angela doesn’t.
“I thought we’d be safe in a hospital,” she says. “But we weren’t.
“When I got back from the shower, I knew as soon as I came in the room that I was alone. There was a silence so unnatural I felt faint and had to grab the doorjamb. Everything was wrong, but I couldn’t see how. I went over to your cot and there was just a slight dent in the white cotton sheet to show that you’d been there. I put my hand in your cot—I couldn’t believe you’d gone—I searched every corner in case you were hidden somehow, and I felt your warmth for the last time.”
My mother weeps.
“I couldn’t remember if I’d looked at you again before I went out. I shouldn’t have left you.”
I reach out and take her hand. It is the first time we’ve touched. Her hand is soft and warm and I squeeze it.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I say.
EIGHTY-FOUR
Emma
WEDNESDAY, MAY 16, 2012
Two weeks later, I’m sitting in the waiting room of a magistrate’s court with Mick and Kate. Mick has put on a terrible stained tie as a nod to the occasion and brought an Egg McMuffin in his pocket. “Bit late up this morning,” he’d explained.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be ready,” he said to Kate when he finally swallowed the last mouthful. “I’ll go outside for the arrival. Can’t wait to see his face.”
Kate’s in a severe black suit and white shirt. She looks like an undertaker’s receptionist. She’s up and down all the time, talking to DI Sinclair in the corner.
Her story a
bout Angela and me had caused a huge fuss when it came out. She’d had to write it carefully, she said, leaving out anything that might identify Will as the rapist and hedging round Jude’s role. There was a line saying: “Police have arrested a seventy-three-year-old woman as part of their investigation.”
“I don’t want to be responsible for their trials collapsing,” she told me. “There’ll be plenty of time to tell that part of the story later.”
The day after Angela and I met for the first time, the Post put our reunion on the front page and on three pages inside. There were pictures of me and Angela with our arms around each other. It was the first time we’d held each other and we’d needed Mick to give us permission, almost.
“Come on,” he’d said when we hovered nervously near each other, neither ready to make the first move. “You’ve waited forty-two years for this. Give her a hug, Angela.”
Mick clicked away for ages but when he stopped, we couldn’t let go.
Joe had cried and Kate put her arm round him. Everyone seemed to be hugging.
• • •
But there’s no happiness here. This is where my misery started. And where it will end. It’ll be the first time I’ve seen Will since that day at his house. I wasn’t going to come, but DI Sinclair said Will was going to fight it all the way. I suppose I knew he would. His arrogance wouldn’t let him do anything else. Kate said she’d heard he was putting all the blame on Soames. Soames’s face was identifiable in the photographs. He was the one with the record of sex offenses.
I couldn’t let him think I would back off. So I’ve come. To show him I’m still here. Like Banquo’s ghost.
He arrives with a swagger.
“I have come to protest my innocence,” Will says on the steps of the court, turning his best side to Mick’s camera.
I can feel every inch of my skin, as if I’m on fire, as I stand up from my seat and face my attacker. He looks startled and his public face disappears. He is just a frightened old man.
Jude isn’t here. She’s retreated from me, from everyone, since she was arrested. She seems to have shrunk in the days that have followed her confession and she’s refusing to eat.
Barbara is staying with her, while she is on bail. To look after her—picking up where she left off all those years ago. I’ve told Jude I don’t hate her. But I think I do. I’ve tried to understand why she took me from the hospital, what drove her. I’ve tried to put myself in her desperate shoes. But all I can think of is Angela’s face when she found me gone. And her years of agony.
When I asked Jude how she could have lived with herself, knowing what they were going through, she said she forced herself not to think about them.
“They had other children,” she said, as if that made it right. I wanted to scream at her but there was no point. She is shielded by her self-obsession. Her sense of entitlement. Whenever she’d wanted something, she took it whatever the consequences because she felt she deserved it.
I now saw why it was she threw me out without a backwards glance. She had to have Will so I had to go. I was collateral damage.
Angela won’t talk about her. Won’t speak her name. She says she wants to concentrate on the future, not the past.
We speak on the phone every day with a growing familiarity and I wonder if I’ll ever call her Mum. Not yet. She still calls me Alice and then corrects herself. I feel like I am two people now. Emma and Alice. I’m going to see my brother and sister next week. I think I’m ready now and Angela wants us to meet, but I’m not sure how they feel about it. About me. The shock of my reappearance must be taking its toll on them as well. I’m the missing child who caused so much unhappiness to their family. Angela says they are thrilled I have been found, but she wants everyone to be happy. I need to take it a step at a time.
• • •
I sit back down with Kate and catch my breath after Will goes into court. I feel elated and destroyed by the confrontation, shaking with the effort.
“You did brilliantly,” Kate says. “All over now.”
Well, almost.
EIGHTY-FIVE
Emma
TUESDAY, MARCH 26, 2013
I started calling the baby Katherine after the police interviews, because she was a person at last. I’d named her for Kate. Without her, I would still be in hell.
Paul calls her Katherine as well. Naming her means we can talk about her and grieve for her. My child. I hadn’t realized how much I missed her. She was a physical presence in my life for such a short time—like Angela with me—but she’s been part of me ever since, my ghost child.
I had to wait another week to hear what the police would do. It was DI Sinclair himself who rang. He said I would be formally notified but he wanted to tell me there was no evidence I had harmed my baby and he was recommending no further action. He said it wouldn’t be in the public interest to pursue me after twenty-eight years for the technical offenses of failing to register a birth or to notify the Coroner. I tried to thank him but I couldn’t get the words out and Paul took the phone from me to thank him.
It felt as if everything was going to be all right, like Paul said.
But we couldn’t say good-bye to Katherine properly until the end of the trials. Jude’s first. It was over before it began, really. A guilty plea, a psychiatric report that said she knew what she was doing was wrong, and a prison sentence.
She looked at me as she was led away, but she didn’t look like Jude anymore. She looked like a husk. I nodded to show I’d seen.
• • •
She’s asked me not to visit her in prison. She said it would be too upsetting for both of us. So I am writing to her instead.
Then Will. A horror story. DNA tests had to be done again on my little girl’s tiny bones to show that Will Burnside was her father. They hadn’t damaged her, the police said when I asked. They’ve been so gentle with me and her.
When I finally took the stand, in January 2013, my legs were shaking, but I wanted to be there. To bear witness. Will’s barrister accused Barbara and me of inventing the whole thing, laying bare my mental health problems with fake concern and alleging we were vindictive whores. Well, he didn’t use those words, but we all knew that’s what he meant.
“I’m an innocent man,” Will said, when he got his turn, switching on the charisma as if it was a button on a remote control.
“Hardly innocent,” the prosecutor said. “You have admitted having sex with a number of women, including former students.”
Will didn’t miss a beat.
“They were willing partners,” he said to the jury, taking off his glasses. “But sometimes women throw themselves at you and then complain afterwards if you don’t answer their letters or stay in touch.”
“But some were girls, Professor Burnside, not women, weren’t they?” the prosecutor said. “Miss Massingham was fourteen, wasn’t she?”
He couldn’t deny it. Katherine had told her story.
“Those I had sex with wanted it,” he said and tried to make eye contact with the jurors. “They were begging for it.”
“Hard to beg for it, Professor, if you are drugged,” the prosecutor said.
“It was a different time then. There was a lot more sex going on. Experimentation with drugs,” Will said.
But he must’ve known he was fighting a losing battle. The jury didn’t know, but Alistair Soames had already admitted his part and given the detectives chapter and verse on their use of Rohypnol. The friend who’d supplied it was long gone, DI Sinclair told me. An accidental overdose. Well, what goes around . . .
When the jury went out, Will’s bail was revoked and he was taken down to the cells under the court to await the verdict. It was a bad sign. He came back to hear the jury foreman pronounce the word “Guilty” over and over, and the life sentence had silenced everyone, but he looked at me once as we all stood to
allow the judge to retire. A look of pure hatred.
I simply looked away. He was nothing to me now.
EIGHTY-SIX
Emma
MONDAY, APRIL 1, 2013
There were three of us at the funeral. Me, Angela, and Kate. It was what I wanted. Paul and my dad, Nick, would wait for us at home.
The funeral director had helped me choose a casket for the child. My child. A tiny, woven willow coffin with a simple plaque bearing the name Katherine Massingham.
I’d decided I would do it properly, but I couldn’t bear the thought of putting the baby back in the cold earth. Angela had suggested a cremation and then scattering her ashes together. I loved the idea of her being carried by the wind and we’d talked about taking her down to the coast, to Dorset we thought, when everything was over.
We held hands as we waited for our turn at the crematorium. There was a big funeral before ours with flowers and undertakers in top hats and tailcoats, like at a wedding.
I hadn’t wanted a hearse—too lonely for my little one to travel like that—so the undertaker brought her in a car and handed her carefully to me. She was almost weightless and I was immediately back in our garden, the carrier bag in my hand, held away from me as if it was toxic. It was twenty-eight years ago today. So long ago but it was as if it had happened yesterday.
The man with the top hat under his arm took the lead and we followed him into the chapel, my mother and me, carrying my baby in my arms for the last time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My husband, Gary, my children, Tom and Lucy, and my parents, David and Jeanne, for their encouragement and love; my sister, Jo Wright, and friends Rachael Bletchly and Jane McGuinn, who have listened, read, and cheered me on.
My experts: Colin Sutton, for his invaluable guidance and humor on police matters; Dr. James Walker, independent forensic DNA expert; and my brother, Jonathan Thurlow, who stopped me from making a terrible footballing faux pas.
